Calculation of Pressure Distributions for an Airfoil in Subcritical Flow Including the Effect of the Boundary Layer

摘要

An approximate method for calculating the pressure distribution on a thick cambered airfoil in subcritical viscous flow is presented. The method calculates the inviscid potential solution for a contour consisting of the airfoil, the associated boundary layer and the wake displacement surfaces, by means of successive iterations. The method is programmed on a digital computer and the results obtained show good agreement with experimental results for low subcritical Mach numbers. For higher subscritical Mach numbers the approximate compressibility correction is not sufficiently accurate. However if the difference between the exact and the approximate inviscid theoretical results is used to correct the approximate results for viscous flow a significantly better agreement with experimental results is obtained. (Author)